Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation (33 page)

His secret weapon was that he assumed not only that he would like the people he met; he assumed also that they would like him. That vast self-confidence of his coupled with that frank confidence he had in others made for a combination that was as irresistible as it was disarming.

It was a weapon so powerful that it brought about a new kind of revolution. Instead of eliminating the enemy and starting from zero, the enemy was incorporated into a new order deliberately built on the foundations of the old. Conceiving of his revolution not primarily as the destruction of apartheid but, more enduringly, as the unification and reconciliation of all South Africans, Mandela broke the historical mold.

Yet, as his reaction to the crowd’s response to him at Ellis Park showed, he surprised himself along the way. He underestimated the strength of his charm.

One Sunday a few weeks after the Springboks’ victory, Nelson Mandela visited a church in Pretoria. This church was Dutch Reformed, the denomination that had once sought to provide biblical justification for apartheid; that had persuaded Constand Viljoen there would be separate heavens for blacks and whites; that had exiled his brother Braam for calling the new doctrine a heresy. “That was the occasion,” Mandela said, his eyes sparkling, “when I saw that the impact of the rugby match was going to last, that the attitude of the Afrikaners towards me really had changed completely.” During the service he addressed the faithful in Afrikaans, and afterward they surrounded him outside the church door, pressing in around him like a scrum. This was exactly what had happened to him at a hundred ANC rallies in townships up and down the land. Everywhere he went the black people treated him as if he were a cross between Michael Jordan, Evita Perón, and Jesus Christ. Now here the whites were doing the same. “From the crowd, hands reached out wanting to shake my hand. And the women—they wanted to kiss my cheek! They were so spontaneous, so enthusiastic. They were falling over each other, and as for me, I was bounced from pillar to post. And I lost a shoe. Would you believe it? I lost a shoe!”

Mandela was almost doubled over with laughter as he recounted the story. He laughed because it was funny, but also because he was describing the consummation of his life’s dream, the moment he understood that South Africa was one country at last.

EPILOGUE

Twelve years after the Rugby World Cup final, in August 2007, a bronze statue of Nelson Mandela was unveiled in London’s Parliament Square alongside ones of Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill. Reporting on the event, one British national newspaper described Mandela as a “black leader.” No offense was meant, presumably, but it still felt vaguely insulting to see him described in such terms. As it would have been to see Lincoln or Churchill described merely as “white leaders.”

To identify Mandela by his race is to diminish him and to miss the point. Tony Benn, a veteran British parliamentarian, was closer to the mark when he described Mandela at the unveiling ceremony as “the president of humanity.”

But it is also to miss the point to imagine that Mandela, then eighty-nine years old, was some kind of an aberration of nature. As he said when his turn came to speak, frail but with steady voice, “Though this statue is of one man, it should in actual fact symbolize all those who have resisted oppression, especially in my country.”

Mandela’s modesty could be affected sometimes, but this time it was not. He was the expression of the best his country had to offer. I saw it myself time and again during the six years I was based in South Africa, between 1989 and 1995, a time when, amid all the hopeful forward movement, terrible violence was unleashed in the black townships, especially those around Johannesburg, where I lived. The best thing about South Africa was not Mandela, but that the country was awash with mini-Mandelas, with people like Justice Bekebeke, his girlfriend, Selina, or “Terror” Lekota, the premier of the Orange Free State who invited Eddie von Maltitz to his birthday party.

The first time I interviewed Mandela, early in 1993, I asked him how it was that the ANC’s message of “non-racialism” had captured black South Africa’s imagination at the expense of the rival PAC’s vengeful “one settler, one bullet.” He replied that history had shown his people to be warm, kind, and generous, even in dealing with their enemies. “Bitterness does not enter the picture,” he said, “even when we fought against something we regard as being wrong.” The message of the African National Congress, he said, had “merely consolidated that historical pattern.”

The truth of that was borne out by my experience, but it was not the whole truth. A different kind of ANC leader could have elected the easier option of tapping into the indignity and hurt black South Africa had endured and channeled it toward violent confrontation. It took a rare wisdom for Mandela to say to his people, as he paraphrased it for me in that same interview, “I understand your anger. But if you are building a new South Africa you ought to be prepared to work with people you don’t like.”

His generous pragmatism was all the more unlikely given the historical pattern of his own life. Albert Camus wrote this in his book
The Rebel
: “Twenty-seven years in prison do not, in fact, produce a very conciliatory form of intelligence. Such a lengthy confinement makes a man either a weakling or a killer—or sometimes both.” In defense of the French philosopher, he died in 1960, before Mandela had even been jailed. Few would have disputed the logic of what Camus wrote when he wrote it. Mandela was a first, and quite possibly a last. He was to South Africa what George Washington had been to the United States, the indispensable man. As Archbishop Tutu remarked to me, “We couldn’t have done it without him, you know.”

Mandela stopped a war from happening but that did not mean that he bequeathed to South Africa a state of perfect peace and harmony, any more than Washington did in the United States. After apartheid South Africa shed its global singularity, it ceased to be the paragon of injustice and the (entirely merited) scapegoat for humanity’s incapacity to overcome its racial, tribal, nationalistic, ideological, and religious antagonisms. It became a country that had the same challenges as others in similar economic circumstances: how to deliver housing for the poor, how to combat violent crime, how to fight AIDS. And there was corruption, there were unsavory examples of political patronage, there were doubts as to the ANC’s efficiency in government. And humanity’s eternal bane, the regressive problem of skin color, did not magically disappear either, though by the start of the twenty-first century the transformation was such that there were not too many countries whose black and white citizens engaged as naturally as they did in South Africa.

It was also true that the political fundamentals remained as sound as Mandela had left them at the end of his five-year presidential term: the country remained a model of democratic stability and the rule of law remained firm.

Whether this would remain the case forever, who could possibly know? What would endure was Mandela’s example, and that glimpse of Utopia his people saw from the mountaintop to which he led them on June 24, 1995. When I asked Tutu what the lasting value of that day would be, he replied, “It’s simple. A friend in New York gave the answer when he said to me, ‘You know what? The great thing about everything good that has happened is that it can happen again.’ Simple as that.”

WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

NIËL BARNARD: held a senior National Party position in Mandela’s power-sharing government until his retirement from the post in August 1996, when Mandela hosted a farewell banquet at his official residence in Pretoria to honor his contribution to peaceful change. Today he works as a consultant, using his “experience and expertise,” as he puts it, advising African leaders throughout the continent “on governing and governance.”

JUSTICE BEKEBEKE: became chief electoral officer for the Northern Cape Province of South Africa and in 2004 formed part of a team of independent international monitors that traveled to the United States to help certify that the presidential elections that year were free and fair.

P. W. BOTHA: died of a heart attack aged ninety in 2006. Mandela sent his condolences to Botha’s family and said, “While to many Mr Botha will remain a symbol of apartheid, we also remember him for the steps he took to pave the way towards the eventual peacefully negotiated settlement in our country.”

CHRISTO BRAND: runs the official tourist shop on Robben Island. His son Riaan, the one Mandela secretly cradled in prison when he was eight months old, died in a car crash in 2005. Mandela, whose own son died at a similar age in a car accident while Mandela was on Robben Island, flew down to Cape Town to comfort his old jailer.

KOBIE COET SEE: died of a heart attack aged sixty-nine in 2000. Mandela said, “We shall always cherish and hold dear the memory of Kobie Coetsee as one of the major architects of transformation towards a democratic South Africa. It saddens us that he passed away before we, and the country, could adequately pay our tribute to this quiet and unassuming man for his pioneering contributions we are now experiencing the fruits of.”

NICHOLAS HAYSOM: worked for the United Nations in conflict resolution and nation-building in Lebanon, Nigeria, Indonesia, the Philippines, East Timor, Sudan, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Lesotho, Colombia, Congo, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Nepal, Myanmar, and Iraq before being appointed director for political affairs in the Executive Office of the UN Secretary-General.

NELSON MANDELA: a few weeks short of his eighty-sixth birthday, in June 2004, he called a news conference to announce his retirement, at the end of which he said, “Thank you very much for your attention, and thank you for being kind to an old man—allowing him to take a rest, even if many of you may feel that after loafing somewhere on an island and other places for twenty-seven years the rest is not really deserved.” Since then he has dedicated himself to his three personal charities: the Mandela Rhodes Foundation, the Nelson Mandela Foundation, and the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, dedicated respectively to promoting education, fighting poverty, and combating HIV/AIDS.

LINGA MO ONSAMY: is chief of corporate security for South African Airways, but remains close to Mandela. He is married to a niece of Mandela’s wife, Graça Machel, and is often over at Mandela’s home for Sunday lunch.

EDDIE VON MALTITZ: still lives on his farm in the Orange Free State, still wears military camouflage gear, still carries a gun, and still phones South African radio stations to denounce perceived wrongs.

MORNÉ DU PLESSIS: runs the Sports Science Institute of South Africa and is a member of the World Sports Academy, a body of former sporting greats that includes Jack Nicklaus, Dan Marino, Martina Navratilova, and Sir Bobby Charlton. Each year they gather to select the winners of the Laureus World Sports Awards, sports’s closest equivalent to the Hollywood Oscars.

CONSTAND VILJOEN: runs a farm peacefully in what is now called Mpumalanga Province (it was the Eastern Transvaal when he grew up there) and takes occasional vacations in Cape Town, staying with his wife at a seashore house available to retired servicemen called “el Alamein.”

BRAAM VILJOEN: devotes his working hours to his farm north of Pretoria. He and his brother are closer than at any time since their childhoods. They enjoy talking politics.

FRANÇOIS PIENAAR: works as a senior executive for First National Bank in Cape Town. Mandela, who is the godfather to his eldest son, Jean, has invited him, his wife, Nerine, and their children to his home on several occasions. Mandela nicknamed Pienaar’s younger son, Stephane, “Gora,” which means “Brave One” in Xhosa.

TOKYO SEXWALE: a philanthropist and multimillionaire businessman, with interests in diamond and platinum, remains a leading force in the ANC.

EUGENE TERREBLANCHE: the leader of the far-right Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) was jailed in 1997 for grievous bodily harm and attempted murder, both involving defenseless black men. He was released in 2004 and now delivers sermons preaching repentance and redemption.